


In Accord, Part Seven - The line in the sand

by ninemoons42



Series: In Accord [7]
Category: X-Men (Comicverse), X-Men: First Class (2011) - Fandom
Genre: Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - Dark, Alternate Universe - Fantasy, Archery, Assassins & Hitmen, Gen, Inspired by Art, Medieval Medicine, Swords & Fencing
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-03-17
Updated: 2012-03-17
Packaged: 2017-11-02 02:06:25
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,245
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/363812
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ninemoons42/pseuds/ninemoons42





	In Accord, Part Seven - The line in the sand

  


title: In Accord, Part Seven - The line in the sand  
author: [](http://ninemoons42.dreamwidth.org/profile)[](http://ninemoons42.dreamwidth.org/)**ninemoons42**  
word count: approx. 2180 in this installment  
fandom: X-Men: First Class [movieverse]  
characters: Charles Xavier, Erik Lehnsherr, Raven Darkholme, Angel Salvadore, Emma Frost, Jean Grey, Scott Summers  
rating: R [may go up in later chapters]  
notes: Continuing from [this](http://jamesorangecat.tumblr.com/post/15666553689/this-is-for-the-lovely-k-a-belated-holidays-gift), and [this](http://fassyfaceavoythere.tumblr.com/post/15721726522/charles-stops-and-looks-him-straight-in-the-eyes). [Part One](http://archiveofourown.org/works/331285), [Part Two](http://archiveofourown.org/works/334798), [Part Three](http://archiveofourown.org/works/341335), [Part Four](http://archiveofourown.org/works/345593), [Part Five](http://archiveofourown.org/works/349325), [Part Six](http://archiveofourown.org/works/359132). These are not the Charles and Erik you think you know.  
Work in Progress. Please heed the rating.

  
This is what Erik sees when he looks at his hands. He sees long fingers and sunken knuckles. He sees ragged nails and chapped fingertips. He sees old wounds and fresh cuts. He sees calluses and shiny burn scars. He sees gnarled and knotted strength, built up by years of grasping weapons, by years of hitting things. He sees hands wrapped around a sword, a knife, a club, a chain. He sees hands curled into fists or open and rigid like sharp-bladed axes. He sees hands stained with old blood and with new.

For some reason, however, no one in the village seems to care about this - not the parents, not the older men and women, not the children.

He thinks of Raven's hands, small and delicate but sure and fearless around his as she teaches him her way of fighting with a knife. He hears her voice whispering to him, teaching him about proper grip, proper handling, proper technique.

He thinks of Angel's hands clutching at his wrist. Shaky steps over shifting sand. Holding on to him, as if to tell him that she trusts him to help her totter home.

He thinks of Emma and her bandages, of the hand she'd held out to the vision that only the two of them could see - the same hand she'd slipped into his. The same certainty and knowledge in her eyes. The sincerity of her apologies and of her declaration.

And now Erik sees Charles holding on to his hands, and he feels the prodigious strength, the power of a man who can string a bow taller than himself and in the next notion aim and nock and loose. All of that might concentrated in his white-knuckle grip, right hand clenched tightly around Erik's right wrist.

Erik is kneeling on the floor of the infirmary, at the head of the low pallet Charles is lying on; he is bent over Charles, silently lending him his strength. It might even be the same pallet Erik had occupied on his first night in the village.

Raven is there with them, bent over Charles. Her hands are shaking as she goes about the work of saving her friend's life, following the instructions he gives her through gritted teeth.

With the initial, makeshift bandanges carefully cut away, the long slash of a knife wound up his left arm spirals up from wrist to shoulder, bloody trails terminating just over his left collar bone.

"That's it, tighter," Charles mutters. "You have to make sure you seal the edges of the wound together. Pull the knots as tightly as you can."

His sharp hiss of pain is answered by her frightened, determined gasp.

Charles and Raven laboring for each breath - Erik can hear them both clearly, louder than the crackling of the fire, louder than the sputtering of the wick in the lamp placed next to the bed so they can all see what they're doing.

"It's all right, Raven, a makeshift job will do," Erik suddenly finds himself saying. "We just need to make sure he'll survive until Armando gets back here."

"No, it won't. I can do this," she growls, half as a response to him and half as an encouragement to herself. "I can't let Charles lose his arm. I won't."

She repeats Charles's instructions under her breath. Pour the dark green tincture over his wound - it makes him hiss in a breath and close his eyes in a grimace. In the lamplight Erik can see the tears sliding down his face. Sponge away the excess medicine with a wad of clean cloth. Smooth on a thick coating of some pale yellow salve, then wind the bandages, a first layer of loose-weave laid carefully over the gaping edges of torn muscle, then the long rolls of heavier cloth.

Every line in Raven's body is drawn taut with concentration: her fingers measuring out bandages. The movements of her hands as she cleans the wound and spreads the salve and binds Charles's arm back together. She draws one of her knives, uses the blade end to cut the bandages and the grip end to help tighten the knots.

Every moment passes by with excruciating slowness - as intimate to Erik as every single injury he's ever had, as interminable as each of the terrifying battlefield surgeries he's ever been privy to.

Eventually he loses almost all feeling in his right hand - all he's aware of is a distant sensation of pressure. When he looks at his own hands he can see Charles's fingers pressing deep dents into his skin, and the beginnings of bruises edged in the bright red and the dull blue of broken veins.

Still Erik doesn't move, and every now and then when Charles flinches away Erik catches him without a second thought, moves the healer's right hand back into the crushing grip on his wrist. Erik can't bear this pain for Charles, but he can help Charles bear that pain, and he thinks nothing of his own discomfort.

Finally, Raven cuts through the shoulder seams on Charles's bloody, ragged shirt, her hands shaking as she cleans and dresses the terminus of the long wound. The smell of the salve hangs heavily in the charged air that the three of them are breathing - it smells like the forest surrounding the valley, it smells like rainwater and rock salt - but better to be overwhelmed by that than by the blood spilled out onto their hands, darkening Raven's fingers and Charles's torso and Erik's wrist.

"Help me lie down," Charles says at last. "I can stay on my side, keep the weight off my arm for now." He sounds as winded as though he'd shot a hundred arrows, two hundred, instead of his customary fifty. "Raven?"

"Charles," she says, and she sounds frightened, and she sounds lost, and she sounds sad.

"Thank you. You did very well."

"I'll be the judge of that. You have to live. You have to survive until Armando gets back. Until he can do a better job than I did." She sobs, and she muffles the sounds in her sleeves. "Please, Charles."

Erik finishes propping Charles up so he's lying on his right side. He nods, gravely, once, and gets up, and goes over to Raven. He gets down on his knees next to her, takes the knife still hanging from her limp fingers and replaces it in the sheath hanging from her belt. "Are you all right?"

She shakes her head, mutely.

"He won't be all right, either, if you keep worrying. And I won't be all right if you can't trust me to deal with him. Your part of this night is over, and mine is beginning. Let me do what I must."

"You'll stay with him?"

"I will. For as long as I'm needed."

Raven closes her eyes for a long moment. She is trembling as she lays her head briefly on Erik's shoulder. Finally, reluctantly, she turns away. She pushes out of the infirmary and doesn't look back.

Erik tries to clean up, tries to put the room back into some semblance of order, but short of getting down on his hands and knees to scrub away the pools of red-brown and green, the best he can do is to put everything else away in a shadowed corner, and close the door.

When he gets back to Charles in the pallet, the healer's eyes are closed. His face is pale with exhaustion and pain.

"Who did this to you," Erik mutters.

He's not expecting an answer, so he looks up in surprise when Charles exhales and says, "Someone I've fought before. A woman."

Dread clamps its cold hard hands around Erik's heart. Dread and fear, and a terrible foreknowledge.

Charles is speaking again, a thread of anger laced into the quiet words. "Red hair. Perhaps she has green eyes. It's hard to tell. Scars everywhere. She screams the most terrible things. When I first met her, so long ago, she was already beginning to fall apart; I can't help but think she must have simply continued to go insane. That first time, I tried to help her, and she attacked me instead. Almost threw me over a cliff."

"She uses knives, doesn't she," Erik says, suddenly. "The woman who did this to you. I can describe the blades she carries. I can describe the armor she wears on her arms. I can describe the shadows that never seem to leave her face."

Charles is laughing, bitterly. "You know her. But of course you do."

"Raven says, you and I have more in common than we'd care to admit. Charles, the woman you fought - "

" - Was your companion in arms, Erik. I know this. And I know of her. What a fool I am, after all. You and I have only made a common enemy out of a madwoman."

"And her companion," Erik says, and he thinks of Scott, loyal shadow, reeking of hopelessness.

Silence falls, broken only partly by the low crackling of the fire.

"I do not know if she can make any more use of him," Charles says. "I - I - "

Again the clench around Erik's heart. "I do not think anyone would fault you, Charles, if you broke your vow because of them. That for him - and especially for her - you would be required to break it. That would be the only thing you could do, the right thing to do.

"I wish I'd had the presence of mind to attempt it, before coming here."

"Perhaps you should have done," is Charles's half-mocking reply. "They caught me unawares as I passed through a town. I still don't know how they found me, how long they had been following me. I was trying to find lodgings for the night, and I walked around a corner - and the man was there. He drew his sword and went straight for my throat."

Charles's eyes grow distant, and Erik has the sense that the healer no longer sees the infirmary as he continues to unspool his story. "I had no space to use my bow, and I could not risk loosing an arrow and end up harming the people surrounding my opponent and me. I chose the safe option - I ran. Not knowing where to go, only knowing that I needed to get away. Hoping I could gain time and enough room to fight with my own chosen weapon."

There's a long, heavy silence, and Erik reluctantly breaks it. "Did you?"

"Eventually," Charles continues in that monotone. "On the outskirts of the town. I ran down to the banks of a river. It was difficult, watching for him in every possible direction. When he'd come on me he was alone, and so was I, and I kept wondering where the woman was. I was outnumbered. And I was afraid.

"I kept trying to remember what I knew of them. I had not been alone the first time I'd encountered them, and they had come to us relatively peacefully, because there was a great gaping wound on her face that needed treating, and, though my companion was the more experienced of us, I had the steadier hands."

A scar on Jean's face? Erik can't remember that, though he can easily imagine how she would have gotten it: close-quarters fighting, the manic way she wielded her knives, the unholy energy she threw into every wild strike. There is no scar in his memories of her; the scars he knows are on her arms, on her wrists, on her back, intricate terrifying lacework, but nowhere near as strange or beautiful as Charles's.

The healer's voice pierces Erik's reverie. "The man closed in on me. I had my knife ready behind my back. Perhaps he thought I was reaching for an arrow. As soon as he charged down the slope, falling toward me, I slashed at his face. I didn't know what I hit - the knife struck something, glanced off his face, and I struck out again - then I began to run," Charles says, and he clenches his injured hand into a fist. Bright red lines of blood seep out through the wound bandages. "I looked back, once I was under cover, and that was when I found out what I'd done.

"I'd blinded him."

Erik has to quell the sudden urge to clap his hands in admiration.

"It was a mistake to look back - that's how she came upon me," Charles says. "I saw her red hair out of the corner of my eye, and I knew I'd seen her before, and I twisted away and tried to keep moving. To stop was to die."

"How did you get away from them?" Erik asks, at last.

There is silence, broken only by a rustle and a pained gasp.

When Erik looks up Charles is sitting up on the pallet, those blue eyes gone too dark and too haunted and too angry.

"I don't know."  



End file.
